A few thoughts about the writing process and my current works-in-progress.

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Songs To Make Words To: Aphex Twin “Come to Daddy”

I like to creep people out. Even in my manuscripts for younger readers, I tend to veer into the uncomfortable creeps. It’s kind of my thing. My imagination has a tendency to drift off, wander under the bed, and then pull out the monsters who have been lurking under there since I was a kid. Those monsters have been hanging around a long time. In the house that I grew up in, I had the misfortune of having a room with not one closet for the ghouls to lingering around in but two. I don’t know what I thought was in those closets at the time but I do recall that an important part of my nightly routine was to make dead certain that both of them were closed. I don’t know if you could really call them closets. They were more like crawl spaces that took advantage of what little space there was between my walls and the slope of our roof. I was terrified of them both. I remember quite clearly that my lone window would let the blueish hue of a streetlight creep into my room and it cast a particular shadow up against one of those closet doors. I would stare into that darkness some nights, hugging my blankets up against my neck in defense of blood-suckers, and my wide eyes would eventually drift off to sleep while I stood vigilant against the closet door swinging open.

So, today’s track is one of the creepiest I’ve ever come across. The trouble with a lot of “scary” music is that it sometimes gets mired down in its own joke. “Come to Daddy” isn’t mired down by anything and it’s certainly not a joke. If it were anyone else, I’d probably roll my eyes at the repeating refrain of “I want your soul, I will eat your soul.” But, I’m pretty sure that the little nasties running around in this video, if I were to come across them in some Clockwork Orange dystopian high-rise (the actual location for this video was where Stanley Kubrick filmed many of the scenes from that film), would actually both want my soul and eat it. Once the screams start to kick in towards the end and the little buggers summon the demon from out of the television and the old lady gets a faceful of malice, I’ve already pissed myself…twice. So, should you be writing a scene and your end goal is to creep people right out of their minds, you might want to turn down the lights, fire up YouTube and spend some quality time with this little masterpiece. Sleep tight!